The Rear Window

Abstract

The article analyzes the use of qualitative research for the construction of a professional vision within specific organizational contexts. Using the metaphor of the screenplay, it describes the modes of knowledge production that supported learning from the experience of accommodating Roma families within a social service organization operating in Italy. This article shows how the development of qualitative research tools for the exercise of a professional vision is the result, neither inevitable nor linear, of a social process of joint construction. In particular, the sequences proposed focus on the situated negotiations and transactions of epistemological positioning and methodological agreement in regard to the possibility of producing knowledge from contextual and local problems. The study valorizes the relationship between qualitative research and access to organizational aesthetics, and to sensorial knowledge about organizational life.